Letters - August 11, 2015

Best-selling author J.K. Rowling – she of the Harry Potter books – once said “It is our choices that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities”.

As chairman of the Talbot PACT Group, I would like to congratulate Jacqui Morley on her choice not to ride her bike on pavements designated entirely for pedestrians (Look At It This Way, Gazette, August 7).

Cycling on the pavement is an issue that is regularly raised at our meetings by worried members of the community.

Some of these individuals, as Jacqui rightly states in her article, are elderly or partially sighted; and have been rendered too fearful to walk to the shops for fear of being mown down by a few selfish individuals who have no regard for the safety of pedestrians.

Then, of course, there are the parents of young children who no longer consider the pavement to be a safe place for their little ones to toddle along.

Amongst our group, and I feel the wider community as a whole, there is a strong recognition that many cyclists behave responsibly and cycle along an appropriate route, and it is not these individuals who elicit concern.

In our group discussions at PACT meetings, there is always an awareness that motorists have an equal responsibility to approach law abiding cyclists with caution and respect.

As we all know, all of our choices carry some consequences.

Every road user has a duty to behave in a responsible and caring manner.

After all “It is our choices that show who we truly are.”

Dave Blacker MBE

Chair of (Talbot) Police And Communities Together

LIFEBOATS

Thanks to all who helped open day

On behalf of everyone at Blackpool Life Boat Station we would like to say a very big thank you to Holy Trinity Church, Elgin and Sheraton Hotels, the Police Cadets, Fire and Ambulance services, Blackpool Model Boat Club and all the artists that gave up their time to come and entertain everyone at our recent open day.

Everyone who came along made the day a great success.

It is greatly appreciated, thank you to everyone involved.

Christine Parry

RNLI Blackpool

DEVELOPMENT

We don’t need a cop shop on retail park

I would just like to say I think Blackpool Council have finally lost it!

To put a police station next to a retail park, using land that could have been used to extend the park for stores such as Ikea, CSL, Pine World, etc, creating hundreds of jobs.

The amount of derelict land in Blackpool and they chose that its just not common sense,

I think we must be the only town without a proper retail park or a bus station. Have they all finally gone senile?

(Mrs) M K Sumner

via emai

WATER

Crisis does not help my confidence

United Utilities IS currently busy with damage limitation to public health following water contamination with the cryptosporidium bug.

Even with ‘gold-standard regulations’, infected water may rarely slip through the net to the public.

When precisely was this detected ? Hours or days ago ?

How long before the public was alerted to boil water ?

This episode may not inspire the confidence of Fylde residents should fracking begin.

Mr G Daniels

Westby with Plumptons

WATER

Bug scare sparked usual public chaos

Once again, the general public has shamed us by stripping supermarket shelves of bottled water since the utility water scare.

The contamination was reported as a ‘trace’, but what do most people do whenever there is a slight possibility of a shortage or scare? Well, they didn’t let the side down and the panic buying erupted as usual.

It’s okay United Utilities urging folk not to panic, but that’s like a red rag to a bull, and there wouldn’t have been any less or more of a surge if they had stated; GET OUT AND BUY BEFORE THERE’S NONE LEFT!

We’ve always been the same! Never changed since the bread shortage in the 1970s, when the general public shamed themselves buying more bread than they needed (not many home freezers around back then) until it had to be rationed by each supermarket and being a bin man at the time, you wouldn’t believe the amount of bread thrown out.